User Interaction References

Performer-Audience

Challenging the public to engage with a real woman instead of with images on a screen, in these works she illustrated her notion of “expanded cinema,” in which film is produced without celluloid; instead the artist’s body activates the live context of watching. (MoMA)

He attempts to keep in mind the relationship of the viewer to the artwork, one of his main objectives being to transform the normally passive experience of viewing art into an active participation. In this, his latest effort, Domestic Tension, viewers can log onto the internet to contact or “shoot” Bilal with paintball guns. Bilal’s objective is to raise awareness of virtual war and privacy, or lack thereof, in the digital age. During the course of the exhibition, Bilal will confine himself to the gallery space. Over the duration, people will have 24-hour virtual access to the space via the Internet. They will have the ability to watch Bilal and interact with him through a live web-cam and chat room. Should they choose to do so, viewers will also have the option to shoot Bilal with a paintball gun, transforming the virtual experience into a very physical one. Bilal’s self imposed confinement is designed to raise awareness about the life of the Iraqi people and the home confinement they face due to the both the violent and the virtual war they face on a daily basis.

The “Tele-Actor” is a skilled human with cameras and microphones connected to a wireless digital network. Live video and audio are broadcast to participants via the Internet or interactive television. Participants not only view, but interact with each other and with the Tele-Actor by voting on what to do next. The Tele-Actor system combines two ideas: (1) a human Tele-Actor who is more agile than a robot, and (2) collaborative control, which allows many people to simultaneous participate over the Internet.

HateisHateisHate expresses the challenges Black people face in a world of white supremacy. Using 42 pages of hate mail and the FBI’s new Black identity extremism report, Patrisse developed an interactive installation where participants had the opportunity to follow recorded instructions in Patrisse’s voice. They were asked to cut out words and statements and paste them onto butcher paper.

We all have someone or something we would rather just forget. Things fall apart. Love hurts. Dreams die. But when you summon Death Bear to your door, you can rest assured that help has come. At first you may be intimidated by his stature and color (7 feet tall with a hard, black bear head, black jumpsuit, and black boots), but absorbing the memories of others is a dark art, and Death Bear must present himself appropriately for this solemn duty. Death Bear will take things from you that trigger painful memories and stow them away in his cave where they will remain forever allowing you to move on with your life. Give him an ex’s clothes, old photos, mementos, letters, etc. Death Bear is here to assist you in your time of tragedy, heartbreak, and loss. Let Death Bear help you, and absorb your pain into his cave.

“Social Media Break Up Coordinator” is a performance piece that explores the very intertwined and interconnections of our online and offline lines. I am exploring the connections between our digital tools, and human intervention. where do algorithms fail, and humans must intervene? As users of social media, people live their most beautiful, angry, complex, and complicated lives online. I am exploring a series of solutions following a break up and how to ‘coordinate’ a la a therapist or social media coordinator for an ad agency one’s social media account following this messy un-coupling of algorithmic combinations intersections of multiple people’s lives. Like an algorithm, I am creating a series of solutions that can be combined for a variety of situations- following one night stands, best friend break ups, ending abusive relationships, ghosting, and long term partner break ups, as well as a myriad of others.

The Rift: An Afronauts Journey is an Afrofuturist sci-fi time-space travel narrative and performance by Ayodamola Okunseinde. The speculative narrative follows the expeditions of Dr. Tanimowo, an Afronaut from the future, who travels back in time collecting archeo-biological artifacts in hopes of finding the reasons for the collapse of his culture. The Rift: An Afronauts Journey is a response to the persistent disenfranchisement of Africans and peoples of the African diaspora. The Rift recognizes the lack of representation of these peoples and their culture in current projections of the future. Additionally The Rift argues that the denial of this “future space” misrepresents Africa’s potential and denies the intrinsic human capacity of planning and organizing to its people. The deleterious effects of the above is an erosion of the humanity and agency of the subject cultures in the eyes of the dominant Western culture. Afronaut Tanimowo arrives in New York in 2015, he explores predominately African-American communities, such as Harlem, Fort Greene, and Bedford Stuyvesant, making anthropological studies and field reports in hopes of understanding his past. In so doing, Tanimowo displays a possible representation of the future for peoples of this current time-space.

Audience-Audience

ACCESS is a public art installation that applies web, computer, sound and lighting technologies in which web users track individuals in public spaces with a unique robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system. The robotic spotlight automatically follows the tracked individuals while the acoustic beam projects audio that only they can hear. The tracked individuals do not know who is tracking them or why they are being tracked, nor are they aware of being the only persons among the public hearing the sound. The web users do not know that their actions trigger sound towards the target. In effect, both the tracker and the tracked are in a paradoxical communication loop. The content of ACCESS calls for awareness of the implications of surveillance, detection, celebrity, self-promotion, and their impact on society. The structure of ACCESS is intentionally ambiguous, revealing the obsession/fascination for control, visibility, and vigilance: scary or fun. ACCESS was primarily influenced by the beauty of the surveillance representations (x-rayed bodies, luggage or vehicles, 3D laser scans, satellite reconnaissance imagery, etc.), the invisibility of the collected data, and the power generated by means of surveillance practices.

JusticeLA’s Jail Bed Drop Project was a creative intervention on Christmas Eve 2017 meant to bring attention to families separated by incarceration during the holiday season and encourage a public conversation our jail system. Artists used over 50 jail beds as a canvas and transformed them into symbols with a message. L.A. County is looking to build two new jails with nearly 6,000 beds. Beds are supposed to be where we sleep, where we dream. Jail beds represent trauma, shame, torture and death. Through this project, we envisioned a new, freer and more just world.

Conflict Kitchen is a restaurant that serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. Each Conflict Kitchen iteration is augmented by events, performances, publications, and discussions that seek to expand the engagement the public has with the culture, politics, and issues at stake within the focus region. The restaurant rotates identities in relation to current geopolitical events.

El Tendedero (The Clothesline) is an installation composed of a clothes line, wooden clothes pegs and hundreds of slips. Mayer invited 800 women of different ages, social classes and professions to answer the question, “As a woman, what I hate the most in Mexico City is…” Most answers alluded to sexual violence experienced in the streets. During the exhibition, many other women spontaneously added their answers to the clothes line.

This project was a simultaneous worldwide dinner happening created by Lacy and Pruess to publicize networks of personal, feminist and women’s development organizations around the globe on the eve of Judy Chicago’s first Dinner Party exhibition. The performance was designed as a tribute to Chicago, Lacy’s former teacher, to extend the concept of the dinner party globally, engaging women around the world in a simultaneous event honoring accomplished women in their own regions. Because of time differences, the work constituted a 24-hour performance and was documented by telegrams sent to the museum by over 200 groups. The location of each dinner was marked by Lacy with a red inverted triangle on a twenty-foot wide black and white map of the world, and the telegrams were displayed next to it. The project with its over 2000 participants from all parts of the world demonstrated the extent of feminist organizing in a pre-Internet era.

Voteauction was a Website which offered US citizens to sell their presidential vote to the highest bidder during the Presidential Elections 2000, Al Gore vs. G.W. Bush.[V]ote-Auction is one of most risky and paradoxically successful projects by ubermorgen: it is “the only platform in the world that provide the final consumer an effective role in the American election industry”. A true interchange system that finally “brings capitalism and democracy closer together”.

No Fun is the edited video of an online performance in which we simulated a suicide and filmed viewers’ reactions. It is staged on a popular website that pairs random people from around the world for webcam-based conversations. Thousands watched him hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly for hours, without knowing whether it was real or not. They unwittingly became the subject of the work. Based on actual news, No Fun tries to create a situation of the most dire loneliness and affect, exaggerating the distance and lack of real engagement in online encounters, to slow down the endless social media flux with a moment of absolute reality.

Performer-Performer

I got inspired “we can make fake smile with sending electric stimulation signals from computer to face, but NO ONE can make real smile without humans emotion”. This is words from Mr. Teruoka who is my collaborator to make devices. And the piece was influenced by the work of the French researcher G.B. Duchenne “Mecanisme de la physionomie humain” from Icono-Photographique and the Austrian artist Stelarc’s “Ping body”. Coming from this trail of thought I began experimenting with myoelectric sensors and low frequency pulse generators intending to copy the expression of one face onto another. The face visualizer video which known as “Electric Stimulus to Face test” is one of the experiment of this project.

The audience in the theater watches a drama unfold that is directed by four off–stage characters who appear to be transmitting instructions via the internet to three characters on stage. What joins the characters in this work is their relationship with Death, embodied on stage as a modern incarnation of the venerated Mexican archetype of La Pelona (the bald one). The scenes on stage are devoted to fantasies about necrophilia that are loosely based on the true story of an American male artist who traveled to Mexico in the 70s to rent the body of a dead woman, have sex with her and document it as art. Fusco invokes this moment in the history of performance to explore what it means to have to play dead in order to live in all its political, techno–cultural and gendered implications. As the performers go through the requested sketches, they allude to real life situations of religious and political repression. However, as low–paid service workers catering to telematic consumers of violence, they dramatize these histories as endlessly rerun games in which actors are “meat puppets.”